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October 23. To-day I reached
the sea. While I was yet many miles back in the palmy woods, I caught the
scent of the salt sea breeze which, although I had so many years lived far
from sea breezes, suddenly conjured up Dunbar, its rocky coast, winds and
waves; and my whole childhood, that seemed to have utterly vanished in the
New World, was now restored amid the Florida woods by that one breath from
the sea. Forgotten were the palms and magnolias and the thousand flowers
that enclosed me. I could see only dulse and tangle, long-winged gulls, the
Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, and the old castle, schools, churches, and
long country rambles in search of birds' nests. I do not wonder that the
weary camels coming from the scorching African deserts should be able to
scent the Nile.
How imperishable are all the
impressions that ever vibrate one's life! We cannot forget anything.
Memories may escape the action of will, may sleep a long time, but when
stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow,
they flash into full stature and life with everything in place. For nineteen
years my vision was bounded by forests, but to-day, emerging from a
multitude of tropical plants, I beheld the Gulf of Mexico stretching away
unbounded, except by the sky. What dreams and speculative matter for thought
arose as I stood on the strand, gazing out on the burnished, treeless plain!
But now at the seaside I was
in difficulty. I had reached a point that I could not ford, and Cedar Keys
had an empty harbor. Would I proceed down the peninsula to Tampa and Key
West, where I would be sure to find a vessel for Cuba, or would I wait here,
like Crusoe, and pray for a ship. Full of these thoughts, I stepped into a
little store which had a considerable trade in quinine and alligator and
rattlesnake skins, and inquired about shipping, means of travel, etc.
The proprietor informed me
that one of several sawmills near the village was running, and that a
schooner chartered to carry a load of lumber to Galveston, Texas, was
expected at the mills for a load. This mill was situated on a tongue of land
a few miles along the coast from Cedar Keys, and I determined to see Mr.
Hodgson, the owner, to find out particulars about the expected schooner, the
time she would take to load, whether I would be likely to obtain passage on
her, etc.
Found Mr. Hodgson at his
mill. Stated my case, and was kindly furnished the desired information. I
determined to wait the two weeks likely to elapse before she sailed, and go
on her to the flowery plains of Texas, from any of whose ports, I fancied, I
could easily find passage to the West Indies. I agreed to work for Mr.
Hodgson in the mill until I sailed, as I had but little money. He invited me
to his spacious house, which occupied a shell hillock and commanded a fine
view of the Gulf and many gems of palmy islets, called "keys," that fringe
the shore like huge bouquets — not too big, however, for the spacious
waters. Mr. Hodgson's family welcomed me with that open, unconstrained
cordiality which is characteristic of the better class of Southern people.
At the sawmill a new cover
had been put on the main driving pulley, which, made of rough plank, had to
be turned off and smoothed. He asked me if I was able to do this job and I
told him that I could. Fixing a rest and making a tool out of an old file, I
directed the engineer to start the engine and run slow. After turning down
the pulley and getting it true, I put a keen edge on a common carpenter's
plane, quickly finished the job, and was assigned a bunk in one of the
employees lodging-houses.
The next day I felt a strange
dullness and headache while I was botanizing along the coast. Thinking that
a bath in the salt water might refresh me, I plunged in and swam a little
distance, but this seemed only to make me feel worse. I felt anxious for
something sour, and walked back to the village to buy lemons.
Thus and here my long walk
was interrupted. I thought that a few days' sail would land me among the
famous flower-beds of Texas. But the expected ship came and went while I was
helpless with fever. The very day after reaching the sea I began to be
weighed down by inexorable leaden numbness, which I resisted and tried to
shake off for three days, by bathing in the Gulf, by dragging myself about
among the palms, plants, and strange shells of the shore, and by doing a
little mill work. I did not fear any serious illness, for I never was sick
before, and was unwilling to pay attention to my feelings.
But yet heavier and more
remorselessly pressed the growing fever, rapidly gaining on my strength. On
the third day after my arrival I could not take any nourishment, but craved
acid. Cedar Keys was only a mile or two distant, and I managed to walk there
to buy lemons. On returning, about the middle of the afternoon, the fever
broke on me like a storm, and before I had staggered halfway to the mill I
fell down unconscious on the narrow trail among dwarf palmettoes.
When I awoke from the hot
fever sleep, the stars were shining, and I was at a loss to know which end
of the trail to take, but fortunately, as it afterwards proved, I guessed
right. Subsequently, as I fell again and again after walking only a hundred
yards or so, I was careful to lie with my head in the direction in which I
thought the mill was. I rose, staggered, and fell, I know not how many
times, in delirious bewilderment, gasping and throbbing with only moments of
consciousness. Thus passed the hours till after midnight, when I reached the
mill lodging-house.
The watchman on his rounds
found me lying on a heap of sawdust at the foot of the stairs. I asked him
to assist me up the steps to bed, but he thought my difficulty was only
intoxication and refused to help me. The mill hands, especially on Saturday
nights, often returned from the village drunk. This was the cause of the
watchman's refusal. Feeling that I must get to bed, I made out to reach it
on hands and knees, tumbled in after a desperate struggle, and immediately
became oblivious to everything.
I awoke at a strange hour on
a strange day to hear Mr. Hodgson ask a watcher beside me whether I had yet
spoken, and when he replied that I had not, he said: "Well, you must keep on
pouring in quinine. That's all we can do." How long I lay unconscious I
never found out, but it must have been many days. Some time or other I was
moved on a horse from the mill quarters to Mr. Hodgson's house, where I was
nursed about three months with unfailing kindness, and to the skill and care
of Mr. and Mrs. Hodgson I doubtless owe my life. Through quinine and
calomel—in sorry abundance — with other milder medicines, my malarial fever
became typhoid. I had night sweats, and my legs became like posts of the
temper and consistence of clay on account of dropsy. So on until January, a
weary time.
As soon as I was able to get
out of bed, I crept away to the edge of the wood, and sat day after day
beneath a moss-draped live-oak, watching birds feeding on the shore when the
tide was out. Later, as I gathered some strength, I sailed in a little skiff
from one key to another. Nearly all the shrubs and trees here are evergreen,
and a few of the smaller plants are in flower all winter. The principal
trees on this Cedar Key are the juniper, long-leafed pine, and live-oak. All
of the latter, living and dead, are heavily draped with tillandsia, like
those of Bonaventure. The leaf is oval, about two inches long, three fourths
of an inch wide, glossy and dark green above, pale beneath. The trunk is
usually much divided, and is extremely unwedgeable. The specimen on the
opposite page [of the origional journal] is growing in the dooryard of Mr.
Hodgson's house. It is a grand old king, whose crown gleamed in the bright
sky long ere the Spanish shipbuilders felled a single tree of this noble
species.
The live-oaks of these keys
divide empire with the long-leafed pine and palmetto, but in many places on
the mainland there are large tracts exclusively occupied by them. Like the
Bonaventure oaks they have the upper side of their main spreading branches
thickly planted with ferns, grasses, small saw palmettoes, etc. There is
also a dwarf oak here, which forms dense thickets. The oaks of this key are
not, like those of the Wisconsin openings, growing on grassy slopes, but
stand, sunk to the shoulders, in flowering magnolias, heath-worts, etc.
During my long sojourn here
as a convalescent I used to lie on my back for whole days beneath the ample
arms of these great trees, listening to the winds and the birds. There is an
extensive shallow on the coast, close by, which the receding tide exposes
daily. This is the feeding-ground of thousands of waders of all sizes,
plumage, and language, and they make a lively picture and noise when they
gather at the great family board to eat their daily bread, so bountifully
provided for them.
Their leisure in time of high
tide they spend in various ways and places. Some go in large flocks to reedy
margins about the islands and wade and stand about quarreling or making
sport, occasionally finding a stray mouthful to eat. Some stand on the
mangroves of the solitary shore, now and then plunging into the water after
a fish. Some go long journeys inland, up creeks and inlets. A few lonely old
herons of solemn look and wing retire to favorite oaks. It was my delight to
watch those old white sages of immaculate feather as they stood erect
drowsing away the dull hours between tides, curtained by long skeins of
tillandsia. White-bearded hermits gazing dreamily from dark eaves could not
appear more solemn or more becomingly shrouded from the rest of their fellow
beings.
One of the characteristic
plants of these keys is the Spanish bayonet, a species of yucca, about eight
or ten feet in height, and with a trunk three or four inches in diameter
when full grown. It belongs to the lily family and develops palmlike from
terminal buds. The stout leaves are very rigid, sharp-pointed and
bayonet-like. By one of these leaves a man might be as seriously stabbed as
by an army bayonet, and woe to the luckless wanderer who dares to urge his
way through these armed gardens after dark. Vegetable cats of many species
will rob him of his clothes and claw his flesh, while dwarf palmettoes will
saw his bones, and the bayonets will glide to his joints and marrow without
the smallest consideration for Lord Man.
The climate of these precious
islets is simply warm summer and warmer summer, corresponding in time with
winter and summer in the North. The weather goes smoothly over the points of
union betwixt the twin summers. Few of the storms are very loud or variable.
The average temperature during the day, in December, was about sixty-five
degrees in the shade, but on one day a little damp snow fell.
Cedar Keys is two and one
half or three miles in diameter and its highest point is forty-four feet
above mean tide-water. It is surrounded by scores of other keys, many of
them looking like a clump of palms, arranged like a tasteful bouquet, and
placed in the sea to be kept fresh. Others have quite a sprinkling of oaks
and junipers, beautifully united with vines. Still others consist of shells,
with a few grasses and mangroves, circled with a rim of rushes. Those which
have sedgy margins furnish a favorite retreat for countless waders and
divers, especially for the pelicans that frequently whiten the shore like a
ring of foam.
It is delightful to observe
the assembling of these feathered people from the woods and reedy isles:
herons white as wave-tops, or blue as the sky, winnowing the warm air on
wide quiet wings; pelicans coming with baskets to fill, and the multitude of
smaller sailors of the air, swift as swallows, gracefully taking their
places at Nature's family table for their daily bread. Happy birds!
The mockingbird is graceful
in form and a fine singer, plainly dressed, rather familiar in habits,
frequently coming like robins to door-sills for crumbs — a noble fellow,
beloved by everybody. Wild geese are abundant in winter, associated with
brant, some species of which I have never seen in the North. Also great
flocks of robins, mourning doves, bluebirds, and the delightful brown
thrashers. A large number of the smaller birds are fine singers. Crows, too,
are here, some of them cawing with a foreign accent. The common bob-white
quail I observed as far south as middle Georgia.
Lime Key, sketched on the
opposite page, is a fair specimen of the Florida keys on this part of the
coast. A fragment of cactus, Opuntia, sketched on another page, is from the
above-named key, and is abundant there. The fruit, an inch in length, is
gathered, and made into a sauce, of which some people are fond. This species
forms thorny, impenetrable thickets. One joint that I measured was fifteen
inches long.
The mainland to Florida is
less salubrious than the islands, but no portion of this coast, nor of the
flat border which sweeps from Maryland to Texas, is quite free from malaria.
All the inhabitants of this region, whether black or white, are liable to be
prostrated by the ever-present fever and ague, to say nothing of the plagues
of cholera and yellow fever that come and go suddenly like storms,
prostrating the population and cutting gaps in it like hurricanes in woods.
The world, we are told, was
made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts. A
numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything,
living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in
some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic
insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be
guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen
idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentleman in favor either
of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the
literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English
constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a
manufactured article as any puppet of a halfpenny theater.
With such views of the
Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be
entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for
example, is an easy problem—food and clothing "for us," eating grass and
daisies white by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on
perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the
apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan,
whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our
dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants,
hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for
ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another
plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for
bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of
insignificant things.
But if we should ask these
profound expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals
— lions, tigers, alligators — which smack their lips over raw man? Or about
those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood?
Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these? Oh, no! Not at
all! These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the
Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him?
Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of
creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these
things are satanic, or in some way connected with the first garden.
Now, it never seems to occur
to these farseeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and
plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not
the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself
as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what
creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential
to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos? The universe would be
incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest
transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and
knowledge.
From the dust of the earth,
from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the
same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and
insignificant to us. They are earthborn companions and our fellow mortals.
The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern
civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single
hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content
with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only
ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was
planned.
This star, our own good
earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made,
and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere
man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part
in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or
extraordinary commotion whatever.
Plants are credited with but
dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But
why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation
of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of
communication with?
But I have wandered from my
object. I stated a page or two back that man claimed the earth was made for
him, and I was going to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly
diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not
made for him. When an animal from a tropical climate is taken to high
latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never
intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly
parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended
for such deadly climates. No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the
cause of the difficulty, though she may never have seen a fever district; or
will consider it a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of
sin.
Furthermore, all uneatable
and uncivilized animals, and all plants which carry prickles, are deplorable
evils which, according to closest researches of clergy, require the
cleansing chemistry of universal planetary combustion. But more than aught
else mankind requires burning, as being in great part wicked, and if that
transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt and purify
us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the
tophetization of the erratic genus Homo were a consummation devoutly to be
prayed for. But, glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I
joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature. |
